EXPLAINS MY TITLE.
Ithas always been a favourite fancy of mine that I should like to die upon some sunny, songful morning, in spring or early summer. The thought of dying in the night, and of finding this thin and aërial something, which I have learned to call "my soul," being driven remorselessly nightward, as Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise; the seeing it in imagination, a spectral, unsubstantial shadow of myself, flitting a-shivering out into the black-wombed darkness, and fumbling with filmy hands that it might claspthe closer around it the warm familiar robe of flesh, only to find that robe fallen away for ever—this thought, I must confess, fills me at all times with an abhorrent loathing and dread.
To look up by night at the cold glitter of the stars, and to fancy my disembodied spirit winging its weary way thereto, through fathomless leagues of void and voiceless ether, causes me ever to shiver, and to turn shudderingly to earth again; but the thought of passing peacefully away upon some sunny, summer morning seems less like dying than like stepping out of doors to be among the birds and the butterflies.Thenthe heaven of my hopes would not seem so very distant after all (and oh! how much more heavenly and homelike would that heaven appear did I but know it to bethisside of the stars!), and my first entry into the dim and shadowyrealm of the spirit-world would seem the less strange and unfamiliar for my having to pass out on my way to it through the fields, the flowers, and the sunshine that I love so well.
To me, however, in the utter solitude of midnight waking, and in the scarcely less utter solitude of day-dreaming in the midst of men, the thought which ever most oppresses me in the contemplation of death, is not so much the Unknown which lies beyond, as the thought of its awful loneliness,—the thought that human faces may shine on my face, human hands lie clasped in mine, and human voices bear me company up to the very boundary line of that still and silent land, but that when that boundary line is once reached, all these must fail and forsake me, and I must turn to face the unknown darkness naked, desolate, and alone.
But why do I allow my thoughts, you say, to brood thus morbidly upon death and the death moment? I will tell you. Because I who now write to you have—save only in the last and uttermost giving up of the spirit—been for some narrow space of time dead; because on me there once fell that thin and impalpable veil which cuts off, as by a wall of vast and impenetrable night, the dead one from those whom he leaves behind.
The facts of the matter are simply these. Some years ago I became seriously ill, grew worse day by day, and was pronounced dying, and finally dead. Dead I apparently was, and dead I remained to all intents and purposes for the greater part of two days, after which, to the intense and utter astonishment of my friends and of the physicians, I exhibited symptoms of returning vitality, and in the course of a week or two wasconvalescent. The medical and scientific aspects of the case are, I am assured by those most competent to judge, of unusual interest, but it is not to them that I now wish to direct attention. It is rather to that dim borderland betwixt life and death, wherein the spirit hovers on uncertain pinion, as if hesitating whether to return to the body it has lately tenanted, or to wing its way to the shadowy heights of the world Unseen.
Where, during those two-score hours, I would ask, was my soul, ghost, or life-principle? Had it passed into some intermediate spirit-realm, there to await till the Father of Spirits should command it either finally to quit the mortal habitation in which it had so long found a home, or to return thereto till such time as He should call it to Himself? Or was it still hovering over thebody, struggling and striving to free itself from the fetters which bound it to that which, without it, were but a senseless and inanimate clod?
To that question I am prepared with an answer, and so strange a one, that I cannot hope my story will be regarded with anything but incredulity, nor can I reasonably expect it to be otherwise, for I am aware that what I am about to relate I myself should reject unhesitatingly were it proffered me on the testimony of another.
DEALS WITH DEATH AND THE DREAD OF IT.
Ifthe thoughts which are coursing through my brain at this moment be not less gruesome to read than they are to write, this chapter will, I fear, be but sorry reading; for I feel strangely depressed and nervous, as I settle down to the opening pages of my diary.
The wind is raging and roaring outside until the stout walls of the house seem to rock and sway like tree-tops, and the sudden gusts and squalls make my startled heartbound and beat faster in my bosom, and turn me sick with a sense of loneliness and of loss.
Even when I lie warm in my bed the sound of the wind at midnight strikes a chill through me, so that I shiver in spite of the blankets. As it comes shrieking and sobbing through key-hole and lattice, the very doors and windows seem to partake of my superstition, and to be touched with some uncanny dread; for long after it has died away I hear them creaking complainingly among themselves, as if they too were nervous and in fear. In the wind's shriek at such times there is always to me some suggestion of the sights it has seen, and of the ruin it has wrought. I seem to see, as I listen to its wailing, a weary moon that looks out white and wan upon a bleak heath, where a dead woman lies straining a livingbabe to her milkless breast; or upon a waste of hurrying waters that heave and roar and hurl themselves in huge billows upon one desolate figure, clinging despairingly to a broken mast. And then there is a sudden lull in the storm; the moon is hidden by clouds once more, and the infant's wail, the strong man's cry, and the shriek of the wind, gloating in savage exultation over its ghastly secrets, die away into a distant rumble, and all is still save the beating of my heart, and the stealthy creaking of door and casement.
Even as I write I can hear its wailing so die away in the distance, and I seem to see it crouching, still and quiet and panther-like, yet ever gathering itself together, and creeping nearer and nearer, so that it may take me unaware, and in one sudden bound sweep down upon me, as an eagle swoops upon his prey, and bear me away to destruction.
Listen to it now!—whistling, wailing, shrieking, like a live thing! Is it any wonder, on such a night, and with a sound in the air like that of innumerable lamentations, that I feel strangely conscious of the near approach of death, and cannot dissociate my thoughts from
"The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave,The deep damp vault, the darkness, and the worm?"
For Idofear death, as I believe we all do in some moods. Notwithstanding our reiterated beliefs in Christ and in Immortality; notwithstanding our prayers, hymn-singing, and heartfelt declarations of our trust in God, and in His care for us, are there not moments in the life of each of us when the human nature within recoils in dumb and desolate protest from the thought of an existence in which the body will be left to decay? We think at such times ofour own death and burial. We picture the mourning coaches setting out, with solemn pomp and pageantry of woe, to bear us away to our last earthly resting-place. We see them drive back—briskly now, and as though the grief were left behind with the coffin—to the darkened house, and we see the mourners alight and re-enter to draw up the blinds with a sigh of thinly-disguised satisfaction, and to turn with a natural if humiliating relief to life and the things of life again. And as we think of the darkness coming on, and of that deserted body of ours, which had once so craved for light and warmth and human companionship, lying, in the first awful night of desolation, away out under the sods in that dreary cemetery, we can almost fancy that we see the uneasy soul, restless even in heaven, stealing sadly to earth again, and hovering, for verycompanionship, over the forsaken mound that covers its ancient comrade.
So, too, there are moments of midnight waking, when we lie on our bed as in a grave, and feel the awful thought of death borne in upon us with unutterable, intolerable horror. Then the darkness which shuts out those objects that in the day-time distract the attention of our outward eye, and of our mind, serves only to make our mental vision doubly keen, and to concentrate all our faculties, as to one inward focal point of light, on that hateful thought. Then do we seem to feel the earth rushing swiftly on its way, as if eager to hurry us to our own dissolution; and then do we stretch forth impotent hands and vain, striving hopelessly to stay it on its course. Yet ever is our striving of none avail: Death, hideous and inexorable, stares us in the face—a wall ofvast and impenetrable night, which closes in upon us on every side. We gasp and choke as though some bony and cruel fingers lay clutching at our throat. "Is there no way," we cry, with heart strained unto bursting, "is there no way by which we may escape the Inescapable?—no loop-hole through which we may creep, and elude this black and grisly thing?" But from the hollow womb of night comes back the sullen answer, "Escape there is none," and then, like doomed criminals who snatch greedily at a day's reprieve, we thrust the ghastly thing away from us, and strive to distract our thoughts in folly.
DEALS WITH LIFE AND THE LUST OF IT, BUT HAS NO DIRECT BEARING ON MY STORY.[1]
Shall we not weary in the windless daysHereafter, for the murmur of the sea,The cool salt air across some grassy lea?Shall we not go bewildered through a mazeOf stately streets with glittering gems ablaze,Forlorn amid the pearl and ivory,Straining our eyes beyond the bourne to seePhantoms from out life's dear forsaken ways?Give us again the crazy clay-built nest,Summer, and soft unseasonable spring,Our flowers to pluck, our broken songs to sing,Our fairy gold of evening in the West;Still to the land we love our longings cling,The sweet vain world of turmoil and unrest.—Graham R. Tomson.
Letme frankly confess that I love this world and the things of it, and so, I believe, do all in whom the "great, glad, aboriginal" and God-given love of life is whole and healthy, and not stunted by sickness of mind or body. For the bereaved and the sorrow-stricken I make every allowance and would have all tenderness, but I suspect either the honesty or the health (and by "health" I mean, of course, mental as well as physical soundness) of those who express themselves as being "desirous of departing," or who assert that love of thisworld is irreconcilable with the love of God.
It is not God's world, with its love and friendship and little children, its fields and flowers, sea and sky, sunlight and starshine, and sweet consolations of Art and Song, against which we are bidden to beware. No it isman'sworld—the world which devotes itself to gain, or to the wish to be somebody in society; to the frittering away of our days in fashionable frivolity, or in struggling to outdo our neighbour, not in the purity of our lives, or the dignity of our actions, but in our clothes, our carriages, and the company we keep—thisworld it is which cannot be rightly loved by one in whom dwelleth the love of the Father.
But God's world we can never love half enough, can never sufficiently appreciate and enjoy. Suppose that you and I, my reader,had to make a world—call it a heaven if you will—of our own designing, and were entrusted with infinite potentialities for the purpose. Could we, could all of us combined, ever conceive of anything half so beautiful as this world at which so many of us gaze with apathetic eyes?
"An idle poet, here and there,Looks round him, but for all the rest,The world, unfathomably fair,Is duller than a witling's jest."
At best we could but copy, but if it so happened that we, to whom it was given to create, had never been permitted to set eyes even upon this earth beforehand, what sort of a world then, think you, should we contrive to construct?
I believe that if God were to make a man, a full-grown man in a moment, and were to set him down in the midst of the world, tolook upon it with new eyes, and for the first time, instead of letting him grow up from a child,to become accustomed to it—for it is true, as Mr. Lowell says, that "we glance carelessly at the sunrise, and get used to Orion and the Pleiades,"—I believe that that man would be in danger of delirium from his overwhelming joy and wonder at the beauty and the boundlessness of that which he saw around.
Even this grim old London is full of beauty and of boundlessness; of beauty which strikes me breathless, and of boundlessness of life, and sky; for in what slum of it, be it never so stifling, are we quite shut out from view of the stars or the sunshine, or of the human faces that come and go in the streets? But a moment ago, while looking out from my window upon a crowded, choking city thoroughfare, Icaught one glimpse of a woman's profile, as she passed with her head poised, and half-turned towards me; and though the vision was gone in an instant, the sweep of the queenly neck, ivory-white and stately as a lily-stem, set my senses vibrating with a thrill of exquisite pleasure. And yonder, looking into a window, I see another face, the sweet pure face of a maiden. I run my eye like a finger along the profile, I follow the flowing line of the hair; but even as I look, she turns, is gone and is forgotten, for her place is taken by a girl with a basket of flowers, the flowers that I love as I love nothing else but poetry. It is Emerson, I think, who tells us that God's loveliest gifts are the commonest; and that sun and sky and flowers are scarce denied to a beggar's call; and it is pitiful, as he says in another passage, the things by which we call ourselvesrich or poor. Why, I have gone home from my morning's walk, feeling richer in the possession of a handful of honey-suckle than if I had found a purse of sovereigns by the wayside; nor could all the art-treasures of Bond Street (not that I fail to appreciate them, either) give me a more exquisite thrill of sweetly-saddened pleasure than does the tender perfume of a bunch of violets.
As a child I used to fancy that I found in a flower all my whitest and purest thoughts crystallized into a thing; and now, though I am a man, the white-pure thoughts of my childhood still live for me in every flower that blossoms in the meadows; for the flowers bring me back not only my vanished childhood, but my childhood's innocence and peace. Even in those remote child-days I was persuaded that the flowers were not ofearth, but of heaven, nor while I had them could I believe heaven to be so very far off, after all. "Else how could the flower-seeds have been blown over its edge, and fallen down to the earth-land?" I would say to myself. And I find myself fancying now, as I fancied then, that God takes the flowers home to His heaven in the winter, and every spring when I welcome them back, I feel that they have come as direct from Him and from heaven as if He had leant down out of the skies to give them to me; and I feel that they are not my flowers, but His flowers; for even as I gather them to call them mine, He puts forth His hand and claims them, so that they fade away again to the heaven whence they came.
Yes, I love this world, and the things of it. To me the mere consciousness of life is a gladness, the pulsing of my heart apleasure. I pencil the latter part of this chapter while lying lazily in a sun-filled meadow, and as I write I seem to feel the very drawing of my breath a joy. The sky spreads above me, a shimmering sea of blue—not the cool, crystalline sapphire of early morning, but the deep dense azure of a midsummer noon. How hot the bees must feel in that furry coat! As I lie here, basking in the sunlight, and watching the buttercups dancing and dipping above the grass, like golden banners amid an army of green-bladed bayonets, I do not wonder that the poor bees keep up a dull droning hum of monotonous murmuring. I can see the hot air simmering and quivering above the clover fields, but all else is drowsily, dreamily still. I know that the streets of the far-off city are reeking and smoking with dry and dusty heat, but here I am inanother world, and the bees and the birds are my brothers. This meadow is my boundless prairie; my head is below the level of the grass tops, and they spread feathery, filmy arms above, like the boughs of a vast forest.
Yes, lying here in this sun-filled meadow on this summer morning, I am conscious that I love my life, and that I should be loath to leave it. I love to feel the wind upon my cheek, and to hear it as it whistles by me, singing in my ears, as in the hollow convolutions of a shell. I love to stand and look out upon the sea, or upon open plains and broad sky-spaces, which give useyesight roomand room for our souls to be. I love to lie and listen to the song of the wind among the pine-trees,—the "sailing" pine trees,—and to watch them swing and sway like storm-tossed barks at sea. I love tosee the rook beat up against the wind, and poise and hover and soar, and slide down upon the edge of the blast with rigid blade-like wings that shear the air like a knife. And when I watch him cut the ether in circles as full and fair as the curves of a woman's bosom, I think of him less as a bird than as some winged artist of the heights, who delights in flowing line, and grace of form and feature; and I too feel buoyant and airy, and to my very limbs is lent the lightness of his flight.
I love, too, the companionship of those who love the things that I love—my spiritual brethren and fellow-worshippers; for, to my thinking, the lovers of Art, Music, Nature, Poetry, or of Religion, are all of them in one attitude of mind, and are animated by one and the same spirit—I call it the Worshipping Spirit. It may body itselfforth in the homage-love of the musician for harmony, in the artist-worship of sensuous beauty, or, highest of all, in the adoration of Christ and of that which is spiritually perfect; and yet all these loves are not many loves, but one love, for they are but different expressions of one and the same spirit. Hence to turn from a chapter of St. John to a sunset, a sonnet from Wordsworth, or a picture by Botticelli, is to me not unseemly, but natural, for each of these arouses, in different degrees, one and the same emotion, and that emotion has its source in one and the same Worshipping Spirit.
I love also travel, change and adventure. I love the Botticellis, the Fra Angelicos and the Leonardo of our own princely National Gallery, not the less, but the better for an occasional ramble in the Louvre, or among the galleries of Holland or Italy. I lovethe life, the stir and bustle of our London streets; but I love, too, the old-world rest and repose of Bruges or of Berne; and many a time have I lingered the long day through in the antique streets of Antwerp, listening to the sweet uproar and silvern wrangling that ripples, cloud-borne and wind-wafted, from where the stately belfry soars lark-like above the world. To me to have been happy once is to establish a claim upon happiness thenceforward, and it is for this reason, I suppose, that I love so to re-live the past, and to dwell on the memory of former sights and scenes. It is true, as Frederick Robertson says, that the "first time never returns," and shall I ever forget the exultation of the moment when, after repeated failures, I first set foot on that inaccessible mountain-height which I had risked my life to scale? Even now, lyinghere in this sunny English meadow, I seem to re-live that moment, and to see that scene again. Before me rises one wild and wasteful world of white—a white on which the fierce rays of the sun beat and burn with blinding, blazing, intolerable brilliance. Above, swimming and soaring away into unfathomable azure, spreads the silent heaven, but around, about, beneath, all is white, deathly-white, save only where the vast angles of ice-crag or column deepen into a lustrous turquoise, or where a blue mist broods athwart the mouth of yawning crevasse or cavern. Below me and afar—so far that it seems as if I were cut off from it for ever,—lies the sunny village that I left so many toilsome hours ago, just visible, a wee white dot upon the green. There the air is sweet with the breath of flowers and of the clover-fields, there, too, are the bees,and the butterflies, and the music of rushing water. But here, where the wasteful snows writhe and wreathe around in arch and cave and column, vast and wonderful to behold—above, the shining zenith, below, the sheer abyss and the treacherous descent—here in the solemn solitude and silence of this whited wilderness, I can scarcely believe that I am still on the earth, and of it, and that the dazzling dome on which I am standing is but the white and swelling bosom of the Great Mother from whom we all sprang.
Or, weary of the silence and the snow-solitudes, I close my eyes, and lo! I am down in the valley again, and all around me spreads a blithe and beauteous scene of serenest summer. On every breeze that sings from sunny slope or smiling pasture is borne the windy chime and clamour ofcountless cattle-bells from the hillside, but beyond that, and the unbrokenbuzzandburr, which bespeak the deep content of innumerable bees, all is still, drowsily still. Here, if anywhere, one can realize for a moment the deep, dreamy peacefulness that pervades the opening lines of Mr. Swinburne's majestic "Garden of Proserpine,"—
"Here, where the world is quiet,Here, where all trouble seemsDead winds' and spent waves' riotIn doubtful dream of dreams;I watch the green field growing,For reaping folk and sowing,For harvest time and mowing,A sleepy world of streams."
Here are the bees, the birds, and the butterflies; here, too, nestling cosily on hillside or meadow, are dotted dozens of umber-brown châlets, each of which seems to suggest that "haunting sense of humanhistory" of which George Macdonald speaks, when he says that "many a simple home will move one's heart like a poem, many a cottage like a melody."
And now there is a change in the picture: the drowsiness and the dreaminess are gone, and there is the free, fresh sense of motion, and of the open. In my ears is the journeying music of thediligence—music which despite its jingle never becomes monotonous, for every now and then the horses toss their heads to shake off the too persistent flies, and sprinkle the air with spray of silvery sounds. The road winds along a mountain path overlooking a lake, and the mirroring of sunset fire upon the surface of the water, the cool clear crystal of the blue depths that swim away below, the purple distance of the farther hills, fast-shrouding in light-drawn mist, and lastly, the solemn splendour of thatsky-hung, soaring summit, brooding like a presence athwart the skies,—all these make up a scene upon which I am never weary of dwelling, and which I dearly love to recall; a scene of such indescribable loveliness as to leave me at last bowed and breathless, and
"Sad with the whole of pleasure."
I thought when I penned the last paragraph that I had made an end of telling you of my love of life and of the things of it, but that half-line which I have quoted from Rossetti's most beautiful sonnet sets me thinking of another love of which I have not yet spoken. Need I say that I mean the love of music? not only of the music which is "like soft hands stealing into ours in the dark, and holding us fast without a spoken word," but also of those sobbing soaring strains, which sound as sadly in our ears as does the wintry flittering of dead leaves upona withered bough? To those who feel that every ray of morning sunlight which strikes across their path calls them to a higher and holier living; to whose hearts the pure petals of a primrose are as a silent reproach against their own impurity; to whom a glint of blue sky, gleaming out between rain-beaten tree-tops is as an aspiration towards a loftier, lovelier life; to whom the very wind, as it sings from the gates of morning, cries out "Unclean! unclean!"—to such, I suppose, music must ever contain less of joy than of sadness, if, indeed, it appeal not with a pleasure which cuts to the heart like a pain. It is to them as if an angel from heaven had cast, for one passing second, upon a cloud-screen drawn across the soul, a vision of what theymightbe, of what they weremeantto be, and of what in God's good time they may yet become; and as if atthe very moment when the spirit was pouring itself forth in one unutterable cry of longing after the Divine beauty of that ideal, there rose before them the shadow-horror of what they really are.
FOOTNOTES:[1]Then why print it here? asks the reader. For the reason, I reply, that this Diary is the history, not only of a sin, but of a soul; and that to leave the aspect of my subject here treated unnoticed would be to give but a maimed and one-sided representation. I do not think any reader who studies my sketch-outline as a whole will consider the introduction of this chapter as inartistic.
[1]Then why print it here? asks the reader. For the reason, I reply, that this Diary is the history, not only of a sin, but of a soul; and that to leave the aspect of my subject here treated unnoticed would be to give but a maimed and one-sided representation. I do not think any reader who studies my sketch-outline as a whole will consider the introduction of this chapter as inartistic.
[1]Then why print it here? asks the reader. For the reason, I reply, that this Diary is the history, not only of a sin, but of a soul; and that to leave the aspect of my subject here treated unnoticed would be to give but a maimed and one-sided representation. I do not think any reader who studies my sketch-outline as a whole will consider the introduction of this chapter as inartistic.
I DIE.
I passon now to tell of my death moments. The room in which I died was the room in which I had been born. One half of it was my bedroom, and the other half—that near the window—was my study. There I had done all my work, and there were my books and papers. There, too, grouped around the walls, were portraits of the men and women who seem to me sometimes to be more myself, as Emerson puts it, than even I am, and who are nearer to me and dearer to me, many of them, thanare some of those who sit daily with me in the household—I mean the portraits of my favourite writers.
I do not know whether the literary associations of the room had any part—probably they had—in determining the current of my thought, but I remember that, during the first few hours of the morning preceding my death, I found my mind running on poets and poetry. I recollect that I was thinking chiefly of Rossetti, and of the fact that he was haunted, as he lay a-dying, by passages from his own poems. Not that I saw or see any cause in that fact for wonder, for I can recall lines of his which I can believe would haunt one even in heaven.
Those of my readers who fail to appreciate in its fulness the saying of "Diana of the Crossways" that in poetry "those that have souls meet their fellows," or thatof theSaturday Review, that "there is an incommunicable magic in poetry which is foolishness to the multitude,"—may think this an exaggeration. Ah well, they are of the "multitude,"—the more pity for them!—and can never understand how the soul is stirred by a simple sentence in the god-like language of Shakespeare, or is as irresistibly swayed as are trees in a whirlwind by a single stanza from Swinburne; how the magic witchery of a couplet by Keats can bring tears to the eyes; or how the tender grace of a line from Herrick can set the senses vibrating with an exquisite thrill of joy. Nay, I could indicate sentences in the diamond-pointed prose of George Meredith, pellucid sentences, crystal-clear and luminous as the scintillations of Sirius (and for all their judicial poise and calmness emitted like the Sirius scintillations at awhite heat),—which affect me in a similar way. There are few other writers of whom I could affirm this with the like confidence; but Meredith's thoughts have crystallized into a brain-stimulating prose—every sentence of which is a satisfying mouthful to our intellectual hunger—which is sometimes pure poetry.
Poetry is to my diary, however, and in fact to all I think or say, what King Charles's head was to Mr. Dick's memorial, and it is time I returned to my narrative.
The possibility of a fatal ending to my illness had never occurred to myself or to my family, until that ending was nigh at hand, and so it was that death came upon me in every way unawares. I remember my father bending over me, and asking gently if I knew that I was dying, and I recollect looking up to whisper back, "No:is it so?" and receiving his sorrowful response. It was too late then for me to do more than recognise the fact as a fact, for my brain was so strangely affected that I was utterly incapable of following out that fact to its result. I knew that I was dying—knew it much as I might have known it of some other person—but felt no individual pang of terror or surprise. This state of indifferent acquiescence in that which was about to occur was followed by a sense of regret at having to leave a volume which I had in hand unfinished, and then, with the ruling passion strong in death, I found myself endeavouring to find fitting words to describe my sensations. It is so with me ever and always. Art and Poetry have become such realities, that I cannot take them up and lay them aside at pleasure, but must needs bear them with me whithersoever Igo. I carry my poetry with me to bed and to breakfast; and I can sit and write, or carry on a conversation, with the consciousness of Mr. Lang's latestBallade, or Mr. Theodore Watts's last sonnet, running like an undercurrent in my mind. I am perpetually striving to fix in language the fleeting colours of sea and sky. I can never listen to the trickle and purl of a brooklet tinkling over its pebbly bed, without making diligent search in my vocabulary for a word—the golden word—which seems most to babble and to blab of water. As surely as I find in Wordsworth's poems a background of sky and mountain, just as surely do I find in mountain and sky an echo of Wordsworth's song. To me, too, the sonnet which rises involuntarily to my lips, as I gaze out upon the deep, is as much a part of the scene before me, as is the sun or the sandupon the shore; and I have come to feel with Mr. Lowell, as if a sunset were "like a quotation from Dante or Milton," and that "if Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his voice shall but seem nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean."
I was telling you that as I lay a-dying, I found myself endeavouring to find fitting words to describe my sensations. At this point, however, the train of my thoughts was disturbed—and I recollect a slight reawakening of my old characteristic irritability at the interruption—by the entrance of a sister who had come from a distance to see me. I remember slightly lifting my head to speak to her, and then glancing round the room to see if all were present. Yes, close beside me, and with his head bowed over his hands, sat my father, andround about the bed were gathered the remainder of the family. Nor were these all, for standing among them were three other figures—that of my brother Fred, whose grave as yet was hardly green, and of my mother and my little sister Comfort, both of whom had died when I was a child. If my conviction that I have indeed been dead be a delusion,—as I doubt not many of my readers will think,—is it not strange, I would ask, that these faces should have been with me at the end? Had there been any conjecture in my mind as to the probability of my meeting with my lost ones, I could readily believe that what I saw was the creation of my own brain. But there had been no such conjecture, for death had taken me, as I have already explained, entirely unawares, and no thought of the dead had as much as occurred to me.Their presence, however, so far from causing me any surprise, seemed perfectly natural, for the fact that they were dead did not dawn upon my consciousness.
This, I am ready to allow, strongly supports the theory that these experiences may be nothing more than dreams, for in dreams it not seldom happens that we re-live the past, and hold converse with our departed ones, all oblivious of the death which has come between us. Itmaybe so, I admit, but in my heart of hearts I cannot think it; for if all that I have to tell be but a dream, then does it seem to me the strangest dream ever dreamed by man. Moreover, with these three figures was a fourth—a figure which at first had escaped my notice; and it is the presence of this figure in the room which is to me most unaccountable. My mother, when Ifirst saw her, was standing at the foot of the bed, with my dead brother and sister looking over her shoulder, but at the sight of my father's grief, she went gently round to where he was sitting, and with a caress of infinite pity stooped down as if to whisper in his ear. It was then that I saw for the first time that she held by the hand a little child—a little child whom I had never seen before, but across whose face, as he looked up at me, there flitted the phantom of a resemblance I could not catch.
I remember that even then, brain-benumbed and dying as I was, I wondered who that little child could be; but there dawned upon me no shadowy suspicion of the truth, and I passed away with that wonder unremoved.
I think now—nay, I am sure—that I know who that child was. It was mybrother James John, the eldest of the family, who had died before I was born, and whom, in this world, therefore, I had never seen.
I have little left to tell of my death, for nothing else occurred of any moment, and I am resolved to confine myself strictly to facts. I remember that immediately after I had seen my mother, and while I was wondering who the child she held by the hand could be, there came over me a strange and sudden sense of loss—of physical loss, I think it was, as though some life-element had gone out from me. Of pain there was none, nor was I disturbed by any mental anxiety. I recollect only an ethereal lightness of limb, and a sense of soul-emancipation and peace—a sense of soul-emancipation such as one might feel were he to awaken on a sunny morning to find that all sorrow and sin were gone from theworld for ever; a peace ample and restful as the hallowed hush and awe of summer twilight, without the twilight's tender pain.
Then I seemed to be sinking slowly and steadily through still depths of sun-steeped, light-filled waters that sang in my ears with a sound like a sweet-sad sobbing and soaring of music, and through which there swam up to me, in watered vistas of light, scenes of sunny seas and shining shores where smiling isles stretched league beyond league afar. And so life ebbed and ebbed away, until at last there came a time—the moment of death, I believe—when the outward and deathward setting tide seemed to reach its climax, and when I felt myself swept shoreward and lifeward again on the inward-setting tide of that larger life into which I had died.
IS OF AN EXPLANATORY NATURE ONLY.
Whenthe first rough draft of this diary was lying on my study table, there called to see me, at a time when I chanced to be out, a certain novelist who is an old and intimate friend of mine. He was shown into the study to await my coming, and, on my return, I found him amusing himself with these papers. Of the reality of my death-experiences (which he persistently refused to regard as other than dreams) I had never been able to convincehim, and I was not surprised therefore when, after the conversation turned upon the work each of us had in hand, he referred to my booklet in his usual sceptical tone.
"My dear fellow," he said, laying one hand upon the offending manuscript, "I haven't the slightest intention of disputing the truth of your statements, or of denying that your diary has a certain unwholesome interest of its own, but seriously, I don't think fiction is altogether in your line."
"Nor satire in yours," I replied; "but what have you to say against the thing now?"
"This," he answered, more evidently in earnest, "that you haven't scored as you might have done, but have let slip what opportunities you had for turning out something original. 'Letters from Hell' (which, by the bye, you must expect to be chargedwith imitating, thoughthatneedn't trouble you much) was confessedly a work of pure imagination, and I shouldn't be surprised if the fact helped somewhat to lessen the interest of the volume. Now your book has just enough shadow of probability or possibility to sustain the delusion, and all that will tell in its favour. The public likes—just as Dick Swiveller's Marchioness did—to 'make believe' in the reality of that which is meant to interest it; and books or plays can't be too life-like or realistic nowadays. You have 'made believe' until you have brought yourself to believe in the reality of something which I can't think ever happened; but that isn't my business. What I complain of is this:—that although you have a story to tell with sufficient shadow of probability or possibility, as I have said, to make it interesting, and tokeep up the delusion, you have failed most lamentably to turn your opportunities to account. Take your death scene, for instance. Any practical writer of ordinary ability couldimaginethe sensations of dying, and could draw a far more powerful picture of them than you have done, who profess to have actually experienced those sensations personally. Then what you have to say about Heaven and Hell, and all the rest of it, is curious, and some may think it not uninteresting, but you haven't given us any idea of what the places are like, after all. Why didn't you draw on your imagination, man? Why didn't you go in for the grim, and grey, and ghastly? Why didn't you revel in the weird (never mind Mr. Lang's abuse of the word), or conjure up blissful dreams of the blest and of Paradise? I know a dozen men who could have madetwice as much capital, and far more saleable copy, out of that idea of yours about a man dying, or nearly so, and then coming back to relate what he has seen, as it appears from the standpoint of frail mortality; and I tell you frankly that I don't think you have scored as you ought to have done."
"But what has all this," says the reader, "to do with your diary? We are willing to hear what you have to tell about your experiences, but we didn't bargain for an article setting forth the opinion of your friends on the subject, and we can't help thinking that the introduction of this chapter is somewhat uncalled for."
Well, perhaps it is so, but it is because the conversation given above touches upon some points concerning which I am anxious that the reader should come to a rightunderstanding before he enters upon my after-death experience, that I have inserted it here, and if a very few minutes' indulgence be granted me, I will say what I have to say as briefly as possible. I could, I am sure, by drawing a little on my imagination, have written a far more striking description of the sensations of death, than that which I have given in the preceding chapter, for of such description, in the sense of "working-up a situation" there is absolutely none. All that I have tried to do is to relate my story with a resolute avoidance of anything akin to the sensational. If aught of the sensational there be in the narrative, it is because the thing is sensational in itself, and not because I have attempted to make it so. As George Eliot says, it is far easier to draw a griffin, with wings and claws filled in according to our own fancy, than tocorrectly limn the outlines of a lion; and to keep to the truth has been the hardest part of my task.
When the mental picture or impression left on my mind is but an imperfect one, I have not attempted, as I might easily and perhaps pardonably have done, to fill in the missing outline from my imagination, but have given the picture or impression for what it is worth, and have left it so. My memory is, generally speaking, excellent, and during the first few hours of consciousness after the return of vitality, the recollection of that which I had seen was as fresh as are the events of yesterday. Within a week, however, I found that the greater part of it had gone from me, and that all my efforts to recall the mental pictures were unavailing. I have sometimes wondered if it can be possible that when my presencewas missed from the realms into which I had so untimely wandered, some angelic messenger was despatched with instructions to wipe out from the tablets of my memory the records of my experiences. Whether it be so, or not, I cannot say, but this I do know, that had I commenced my diary within a week of my return to life, the booklet would have been one such as it is not often given to man to write. The subject, however, seemed then, and for a long time after, too solemn to be turned to account for "copy," and each of the several years which have elapsed since I died, has taken with it some part of the recollections that remained to me; and now that I have all too tardily set about my task, I have but blurred and broken reminiscences to offer in place of a life-like picture.
These reminiscences, vague, disconnected,and fragmentary as they are, I have given for what they are worth. If any reader think that I have overrated the value of my experiences, and that I have failed to verify the promise with which I started, I can only assure him that the failure is due, not to the insufficiency of what is strange and striking in my experiences, but to my inability to recall what I have seen, and to my incompetency to do fitting justice to my singular subject.
TELLS OF MY FIRST AWFUL AWAKENING IN HELL, AND OF THE SHAMEFUL SIN WHICH BROUGHT ME THITHER.
The expense of spirit in a waste of shameIs lust in action; and till action, lustIs perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,Past reason hunted, and no sooner hadPast reason hated, as a swallowed bait,On purpose laid to make the taker mad;Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;A bliss in proof, and, proved, a very woe;Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.All this the world well knows; yet none knows wellTo shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.Shakespeare's 129th Sonnet.
Time, which is the name we give to our petty portion of Eternity, has no existence in that Eternity which has been defined as the "lifetime of the Almighty"; and so it was that though I remained in the spirit realm but two days, it seemed to me as if weeks, months, years, had elapsed between my death and the hour when I first became conscious of that death.
I have told you that as I lay a-dying, I felt my life slowly but steadily ebbing away, until at last there came a time—the moment of death, I believe it to have been—when the outward and deathward-setting tide seemed to reach its climax, and when I felt myself swept shoreward and lifeward again. I know there are some who will say that the turning-point which I have called the moment of death was nothing more or lessthan the moment which marked the decline of the disease, and the return of vitality, but this theory, plausible and even probable as it seems, leaves the strangest part of my experience unexplained, and I cannot entertain it; neither, I think, will the reader, when he has heard me out.
Whether my death was succeeded by a season of slumber, in which certain divinely ordered dreams were caused to be dreamed by me, or whether God caused the hands on the dial of Time to be put back for a space in order that I might see the past as He sees it, I neither knew nor know; but I distinctly remember that the first thing of which I was conscious after my dissolution was that the events of my past life were rising before me. Yes, it was my past life, which I saw in that awful moment, my past life standing out in its own naked and intolerablehorror, an abomination in the sight of God, and of my own conscience.
The hands on the dial of Time went back half a score, a score, and finally a score and a half of years, and once more I was a young man of twenty-one. The chambers in which I was then living were situated in one of the well-known Inns off Holborn, and the housekeeper of the wing where I was quartered was a widow, who, with her daughter Dorothy, a girl of seventeen, resided on the premises.
As it was Dorothy's part to wait upon the occupants of the chambers, she had occasion to come to my room several times in the day, and I could not help noticing her loveliness, which, indeed, reminded me not a little of my favourite Greuze picture. When I first knew her she seemed maidenly and modest, but was vain beyond a question,and her manner to the opposite sex was shy and self-conscious, with occasional dashes of an artless and even childish coquetry which was most bewitching. By this girl I was irresistibly and fatally fascinated. I was young, susceptible, and singularly impressionable to female beauty, whilst the loneliness and the monotony of the life I was leading were in themselves elements of considerable danger; and to make matters worse, it was only too evident that Dorothy was not indifferent to my admiration. As I knew that it was but the fascination of form and feature which attracted me, and that nothing but mischief was likely to come of such a passion, I strove my hardest to steel myself against her; but Fate seemed adverse, for one summer evening while I was sitting in my study, waiting for a friend, there burst over London the most fearful thunderstormwhich I have ever witnessed. The lightning was so vivid and the thunder so terrific, that even I, who am by no means nervous about such things, felt strangely moved and unsettled; and I was not a little glad, therefore, to hear what I took to be my friend's knock. When I went to the door, however, I found that it was not he, but Dorothy, and that she was white with fear, and trembling from head to foot. "Oh, sir," she sobbed, "mother's out, and there's no one else in but you, and I'm so frightened that I can't stay by myself. If you'll only let me be here till she comes back, I'll be very quiet and not disturb you in any way."
Knowing my weakness and her great beauty, I had up to that moment studiously refrained from allowing so much as a wandering glance to rest on her; but I could not avoid looking at her now, and Iremember that her eyes, bright and pitiful and beseeching, "her bosom's gentle neighbourhood," and the very consciousness of her presence as she stood before me, set my heart beating so wildly, that it was all I could do to refrain from taking her in my arms then and there, and telling her (forgive the profanation of a holy word) that I "loved" her.
The virtuous determination to be on our guard against some besetting sin or constitutional failing comes to us generally,notduring the moment of temptation, when we are most in need of such a moral reminder, butafterthe event, and when the determination is too late; but on this occasion I heard the inward monitor speak out a timely warning, and that with no uncertain tongue. By a great effort I nerved myself to my accustomed control, and though I knewDorothy would think me churlish and cruel, I told her coldly that she had better go downstairs and wait the return of her mother. The words had scarcely time to pass my lips (I doubt, indeed, if she could have heard them), before they were lost in a terrific thunder-peal, following almost instantaneously upon a blinding flash of lightning. It had been better for both of us, as I have often since thought, if that flash had struck us dead as we stood there; for, with one cry of passion and fear, and calling me by my name—my Christian name—in a tone that none could misinterpret, Dorothy flung her arms around me, and the next moment I found myself pressing her to my heart with a fierce and almost savage exultation, and telling her, amid a score of burning kisses, that I loved her.
Almost immediately afterwards we heardthe opening of doors, which indicated her mother's home-coming, but not before Dorothy had time to tell me in return that she too loved me, and had always done so. And then she slipped from my arms, and tripped away with tumbled hair and flaming cheeks to join her mother, turning as she reached the door to look back with a shy smile and to say—innocently and unsuspectingly enough as I knew well—that the room directly over mine was her own, and that she often lay awake at night listening to my restless pacing to and fro, and wondering what could keep me up so late.
Of the hellish thought which rose in my heart as I listened—the thought that she would not refuse me admittance to her room should I seek her there that night—she could have had no suspicion, for it was a thought of which, at any other time, I shouldhave deemed myself incapable. I remember that I did not fling the hateful suggestion from me, as I should have done an hour earlier, although, passion-maddened as I was, I recoiled from it, and vowed that I would never entertain it. But I brooded over the horrible idea, and sketched out how easily it might be acted upon, were I the foul thing to do it, which I still declared to myself I was not. Had I arisen in trembling horror, and thrust the vile conception from me, she and I might even then have been saved, but I let it enter and take up its abode in my heart, and from thenceforward I strove to drive it forth in vain.
Oh! in God's name, in the name of Love and Truth and Purity, when any such evil or impure thought so much as casts the shadow of its approaching presence on your soul, then, in all the strength of your manhood,arise and thrust it out, ere it be too late! Argue not, delay not, listen not, but hurl the loathsome whisper from you as though it were some poisonous reptile, and bid it be gone for ever!
From the moment that I gave audience to that messenger of Satan, hell and its furies laid hold on me. Sometimes I seemed to be gaining ground, sometimes I seemed to be recovering my balance of mind. "Iwilldo the right!" I cried, "I willnotbe guilty of this accursed thing!" but even as I strove to fix my feeble purpose to the sticking point, some moral screw seemed to give way within me, and I felt that purpose ebbing away like life-blood from a fatal wound.
At last the struggle seemed to cease, and there was borne in upon me a sense of peace, deep, and sweet, and restful. I know now that it was but exhaustion consequentupon the strain I had endured, that it was nothing more than the inevitable reaction from the high soul-tension to which I had been subjected. To me, however, it seemed as the very peace of God and as a sign from heaven, and lulled into a false security, I let my thoughts wander back to dwell again upon the temptation. Need I tell the remainder of my story? Need I say that my passion had but simulated defeat, as passion often does, in order that it might turn in an unguarded moment, and rend me with redoubled fury? The next moment I saw my last gasping effort to will the right sink amid the tempestuous sea of sinful wishes, as a drowning man sinks after he has risen for the third time; and deliberately thrusting away, in the very doggedness of despair, the invisible hand which yet strove to stay me, I arose and soughtthe room that I had prayed I might never enter.
You may wonder, perhaps, how it is that I am able to recall so vividly the circumstances of an event which happened many years ago. You would cease so to wonder, had you seen, as I have seen, the ghost of your dead self rise up to cry for vengeance against you, and to condemn you before the judgment seat of God, and of your own conscience. For this was my first glimpse of Hell; this was my Day of Judgment. The recording angel of my own indestructible and now God-awakened memory showed me my past life as God saw it, and as it appeared when robbed of the loathsome disguises with which I had so long contrived to hide my own moral nakedness. "Sin looks much more terrible to those who lookat it, than to those who do it," says the author of the "Story of an African Farm." "A convict, or a man who drinks, seems something so far off and horrible when we see him, but to himself he seems quite near to us, and like us. We wonder what kind of a creature he is, but he is just we ourselves." It was so indeed that I had thought and wondered. I had read often of "adulterers" and "murderers" in the newspapers, and had thought of them as I thought of lepers or of cannibals, in no way imagining thatmyyouthful escapade could render such words applicable to me. I had accustomed myself to calling my crime "gallantry" in my own thoughts, and I should have regarded one who used harsher language as wanting in delicacy and in breeding; and now I found myself branded as "Murderer" and "Seducer" to all Eternity!
"Murderer!" you say. Yes, murderer, for seductionismoral murder; and the man who has thus sinned against a woman is fit only to stand side by side with him who has taken a life. Ay, and his is not seldom the more awful punishment, for God will as surely require the spiritual life at the hands of the seducer, as He will the bodily life at the hand of the murderer.
The one thing of all others which added to the unutterable horror of that moment, was the memory of the false and lying excuses with which I had striven to palliate my sin to myself. I remember that such excuses took form and shape, and haunted and tortured me like devils—as indeed they were—of my own begetting. "The relation of the sexes," I had often said when striving to silence an uneasy conscience, "Bah! it is but a yoke of man's imposing. I take thewoman I love to live with me, and she and I are shunned as lepers. Yonder is a man who follows the same precedent and from the same motive; and because a priest has murmured a few words of sanction over the contract, he and his partner are fêted and flattered. How can the indulgence of a natural passion which in one set of circumstances is fair and honourable, in another be sinful and foul? Fair is fair, and foul is foul, and no muttering of a man can transform the one into the other."
This is the way in which I had repeatedly striven to silence my conscience, and it is but one instance of the way in which many others on this earth are now striving to silence theirs. "For God's sake," I would say to them, "beware!" Such hardening of the heart against the Holy Spirit, such God-murdering (for itisthe wish to killGod, and to silence His voice for ever) is the one unpardonable sin which is a thousand-fold more awful in its consequences than is the crime which it seeks to conceal. It was the foulest stain on the soul of him who hung by the dying Saviour, and it is, I believe at this moment, the one and only thing which still keeps Hell Hell, and Satan Satan.
Must I write further of the torture-throes of that awful moment, when I first saw my sin in its true light? God only knows how even now I shudder and shrink at the mere thought of it; but I have told you of my crime, and it is right that I should speak also of my punishment. I remember that when the realization of what I was, and what I had done, was first borne in upon me, I fell to the ground and writhed and shrieked in agony. The tortures of amaterial hell,—of a thousand material hells,—I would have endured with joyfulness could such torture have drowned for one moment the thought-anguish that tore me. Nay, mere physical suffering—physical suffering meted out to me as punishment, and in which, though it were powerless to expiate, I could at least participate by enduring—I would have welcomed with delirious gladness, but of such relief or diversion of thought there was none. From the mere mention of annihilation—the personal annihilation of soul and body, of thought and sensation—I had ever shrunk with abject loathing and dread; but to annihilation, had it been then within my reach, I would have fought my way through a thousand devils. But in hell there is no escape through annihilation; suicide, the lastrefuge of tyrannous and cowardly despair, is of none avail,
"And death once dead there's no more dying then."
What had to be endured I foundmustbe endured, and that unto the uttermost, for in all horrid hell there was no nook or cranny into which I could creep to hide myself from the hideous spectres of the past. I remember that I rose up in my despair, and stretching vain hands to the impotent heavens, shrieked out as only one can shriek who is torn by hell-torture and despair. I fell to the ground and writhed and foamed in convulsive and bloody agony. I dug my cruel nails deep into my burning eyeballs, and tearing those eyeballs from their tender sockets, flung them bleeding from me; but not thus could I blind myself to the sightsof hell, nor could mere physical pain wipe out from my brain the picture of the ruin I had wrought.
And then—but no, I am sick, I am ill, I am fainting; I cannot, I cannot write more.